Revenge of inanimate objects, the

The revenge of inanimate objects

Somewhere deep in the back of his mind Alan had always known Frank was
bound to get his sooner rather than later. You couldn't carry on like
he did and not expect to face the consequences at some point. Alan
didn't believe in religion but built into him, as he suspected was
built into most living things, was a belief in karma, that eventually
one thing led to another and that no amount of running could prevent
the wrongs you did catching back up with you in one form or
another.

Ironically if anyone was to blame for what happened Alan thought it
was himself. It was another of his small but perfectly formed beliefs,
one in a series of simple wisdom's he liked to wear about his soul like
a necklace, that if you talked out loud about something that until
spoken only existed in your head then eventually whatever had been said
would come to happen.

He had first noticed it occurring in rather minor, trivial ways; such
as discussing a favourite film with a friend neither had seen in ages
only for the film to turn up on television a week or two later.

More recently in his life it had taken on a far greater and monumental
effect. His girlfriend for five years, Clara, was pregnant with his
child. One night they had been lying in bed and Clara had turned round
to ask him if he thought about children being in their life.

Alan replied he had and for the rest of that night they agreed
together they would give it a try. Clara revealing however that at the
age of nineteen she had been to see a doctor over something else and
learned that she was largely infertile, her womb incapable of
sustaining a child.

A month and a half later Clara was pregnant and Alan could never quite
rid the suspicion that it was words- hopes and dreams as well as long
held personal superstitions spoken out loud -rather than his powerful,
macho seed which had been responsible for bringing the child, a son,
into creation.

In this case what had happened was Alan had been busy in another area
of the warehouse where he worked and had came back to finish off the
job he had started with Frank. Sorting returned items of faulty
furniture, re-boxing them and putting them aside for storage, only to
return and find Frank bent over a stubborn piece of wood that wouldn't
go in right and swearing at it, ferociously and at length, as if it had
just suggested something obscene and possibly true about his
mother.

Alan watched Frank continue in his little diatribe, faintly amused,
until the piece Frank was wrestling with plainly announced it wasn't
going to do what it was told and planted a skelf in his hand.

Frank recoiled and dropped the piece, looking at his hand as if he had
just been shot there. Then he had lashed out and kicked the box he had
been packing, sending its contents spilling back out onto the
floor.

Despite the fact he would have to pick all the bits back up again and
put them into the box, he was grinning savagely, pleased with this
little act of chaos.

"Better watch out mate" Alan said behind him, "That temper of yours
will get you in trouble one of these days, not to mention put you out
of a job"

"Ah, all this stuff is knackered anyway. What's one more bash going to
make a difference now anyway" he said, turning round to watch Alan walk
towards him.

"You've made a right mess now anyway, god I can't leave you alone for
a second can I?"

"I thought you were only going to be a minute. An hour later you turn
up"

"I went for a smoke" Alan told him.

"Mmm" Frank replied, who didn't smoke but didn't express an opinion
either way on the subject, which Alan thought unusual for a non-smoker
to do.

Both men stood over the remains of the unit on the floor, arms
crossed, a quizzical expression on both their faces as if this were an
elaborate puzzle before both of them when really they were just wasting
time.

When it came to wasting time Frank was a master at it and it was
probably this, along with other more dubious personal attributes, that
had caused Alan to gravitate towards him after nearly only a month of
starting work in the warehouse.

Alan wasn't thinking of what was on the floor however.

"I've noticed this about you" he turned to Frank to say.

"Noticed what?" Frank replied, still staring at the mess on the floor
but sucking at his palm where the skelf was, making faint drooling
noises into his hand like a baby does.

"You're a psycho when it comes to stuff"

"Stuff?"

"You know objects, things, anything that doesn't do as its told you
beat the tar out of it"

"Well" Frank said, taking his injured hand away from his mouth and
extending it out to the space in front of them, "Its how I get my
frustration out"

"What frustration?" Alan laughed. Frank was one of the most mellowest
people he knew.

"Any frustration, the usual frustration, whatever it might be. I don't
beat up kids, I don't beat up women, I don't hurt anyone but if I have
to I'll take it out on an inanimate object. That way nobody gets hurt.
Also I enjoy it. Its half the reason I came to work in this place
anyway, beat the living crap out of things that have already been
broken in the first place."

Alan nodded, not in total agreement with what he was saying but at
least with some of it. His own reasons for coming to work in the
warehouse stemmed from nothing more profound in that his last two jobs
had both dealt with people, driving a mini-bus for kids who lived out
in the country and before that looking after mentally-disabled people
in their homes.

Neither of them lasted for very long and Alan had come away from the
two experiences thinking maybe he wasn't the people person he thought
he was after all.

People, whether it was kids who wouldn't shut up or a guy who shat in
his pants all the time, required work, mentally draining rather than
physically demanding work.

Moving around a lot of boxes all day however seemed easier by
comparison and it puzzled him why Frank should harbour such a wrath
towards what they were handling all day.

Even when a box or a load was behaving itself he would invariably
still give it a contemptuous little kick from time to time as he
passed. Like some cruel father reminding his children that, while
behaving themselves, he could still produce the odd beating if they
should ever get out of line again.

Alan sometimes had to remind himself that Frank was far from being the
boss in the warehouse. That distinction belonged to a man called Adrian
Mckie or "Doughnuts Adie" as he was known. A bald, stocky man in his
late thirties who laughed maniacally at his own jokes and was rarely if
ever seen out of the forklift truck he raced around the warehouse floor
with as if it were a grand prix track.

Yet it was almost as if Frank were employed in another capacity. As a
secret agent of terror whose job it was to make sure all the items of
stock behaved themselves and mete out what would happen to them if they
failed to do so.

None of the others behaved like he did, apart from the odd swear-word
when a toe or limb became accidentally trapped, yet neither did they
comment on Frank's behaviour and so Alan could only come to the
conclusion that they were somehow complicit in the way he carried on,
as if Frank were the provider of a necessary evil, a small and
unsightly machination in the smooth running of the warehouse, one that
would make life easier and hopefully keep the money rolling into the
bank at the end of each month.

"Why, does it bother you?" Frank asked him.

"I just don't see the point in it" Alan shrugged, "I understand how
important it is to get frustration out but there are other ways"

"Such as?"

Alan chose his words carefully. He was about to suggest the usual:
sex, drink, drugs and so on, but there was so little he knew about
Frank he didn't know where to begin.

He had only been working with him a month but already he had him
classed as that reticent, slightly insular type of person you tend to
first associate with when you start working somewhere new and don't
know everyone yet. Shyness responding to shyness Alan thought.

About the most he knew about Frank was that he had been in the army
before and that his mother had once been famous as a singer on the
country &; western circuit.

"How about kick-boxing?" Alan said off the top of his head.

"Ach, too much hassle" he said bending down on the floor to begin
arranging the pieces to go back into the back.

Alan bent down with him and started to help.

From behind them came a distant motorised roar gathering in volume
until Doughnuts spinned past them and off to the right. A hand came
waving out the window as it passed and Alan raised one in return. Frank
meanwhile just glowered and offered his middle finger to the back of
the departing forklift.

"I'll tell you the best job I ever had though" he said to Alan
standing up again once they were finished.

"Go on then"

"Knocking down houses for the council. You know, using those machines
with the wrecking ball. I done that" he said proudly.

"Really"

"Yeah. Used to be a whole street of houses not far from here the
council wiped out. Couple of years ago now, maybe you weren't staying
here then but eh, yeah it was a great job. Best feeling in the world,
waking up in the morning knowing you were going to work to demolish a
whole street. It was a right laff. Me and the rest of the boys used to
play lavvies, you want to know what lavvies was?"

"Something to do with the toilet?" Alan hazarded a guess.

"Sort of. The game was if you had a wrecking ball you had to tear down
the house without taking the downstairs toilet out, which was bloody
difficult cause sometimes it was hard to tell which room it was in
without getting out the cab, which disqualified you from the game.
Anyway, whoever managed to take a house down without smashing a lavvy
got ten pounds from the rest, we shook on it see before we went to
work. Want to know how much I made from it?"

"How much?"

"Seventy quid in one day. Seven houses with all their toilets still
standing, not a dent or a scratch in them"

"Wouldn't it have made you more money if you, I don't know sold the
toilets that were there. It isn't cheap for a toilet and I bet you
could have got fifty easy for each one."

Frank however looked mortified at the idea.

"Oh no, a couple of boys tried that and they got the sack. I was happy
playing lavvies."
Both of the men fell silent. Frank seemed to have finished everything
he had to say and Alan was stuck for something next to come out
with.

"So a good job then?" he eventually asked.

"Oh yeah" Frank agreed nodding his head vigorously, "It was great just
being able to tear houses apart, watching them fall apart and nothing
but a big pile of rubble at the end of it. Gave me a lot of
satisfaction."

"Its so much easier to destroy than it is to create" Alan declared
sombrely, trying to be smart at Franks expense (Frank he had learned by
now wasn't the brightest bulb in the box), but as he finished saying it
he couldn't help thinking of his as-yet-unnamed son in the depths of
Clara's enormous belly.

"Oh yeah, I've never been very creative" Frank went on, appearing not
to notice the slight dig in what Alan had just said, "even at school I
was pretty rubbish at the imaginative stuff like Art and English. Good
at Math's though"

"Well that's something" offered Alan.

"Never got me a job as an accountant though did it?" Frank turned to
him and smiled.

It was coming up time for their break so both men finished what they
were doing and made their way down to the canteen.

Over a cup of tea though Alan returned to the subject of Franks
eccentric behaviour. Reading in the paper he learned that a man down in
Barnsely had fallen off a scaffolding on a building site and been
crushed by a load of tiles he had been putting up which had fallen
after him.

There was no picture of the man, the item itself was only ten lines
long, but it reminded him of Frank. Perhaps he thought just because it
had said the man was in his mid-forties and so was Frank.

"Aren't you worried though?"

"About what?" Frank replied munching on a biscuit.

"That one day you'll go to far and the objects will get their
revenge"

Frank snorted derisively into his tea.

"If what you said was true then it already would have happened. The
day of me going too far has already been and gone my friend. Besides of
which I already told you, this stuff is inanimate. It doesn't move, it
doesn't breathe, it doesn't have a history or a sense of personal
justice, and therefore it isn't dangerous to me is it. A man however,
or something that thinks, that can remember- even a wild animal has a
limited amount of memory -well then your messing with the future. You
might forget what you did but the person or thing you did it too might
not and one day, when your least expecting it, come back and get you.
Like I told you I don't take chances like that."

Frank appeared to think for a moment over whether he should tell Alan
something or not. His eyes became restless and he looked over his
shoulders twice to see who else was in the room with them. None of the
other men on their break looked remotely interested in the conversation
they were having. They were too busy leaning into their sandwich boxes
or the breasts pictured on page 3 to care.

Frank leaned in closer over the table to speak to Alan and when he did
speak it was with a hoarse whisper.

"I've been in this world a long time but I've been safe. I've never
been the most popular guy but I've been careful to leave behind people
who don't bare me a grudge or want me dead. About the most negative
thing all the people I've met out there think about me is probably that
I'm an idiot or a fool. A fool I can live with, being hated I
cannot."

That was the full extent of the conversation, a bit of mumbling
rubbish over a cup of tea but it was enough Alan later thought for fate
to do what it did three days later. Frank had laid out his beliefs on
the table, believing that it offered him insurance from catastrophe,
but for three days something else had been going through the small
print of what he had said, picking out clauses and searching for
loopholes, looking for a way to get him back.

Still on the day the accident actually happened Frank's behaviour
appeared to have mellowed somewhat.

He had stopped looking at the rows upon rows of boxes like something
that was ready to bite him and when he complained over something he was
handling it was not to the object itself but rather to the air, up into
the god that looks over all labourers, he applied his protestations.
Even then it was not given in the singular as it was before, where
there was an imaginary target he could zero his rage on, but rather a
general cursing to nowhere in particular, a rhythmic hymn of barbed
expletives and caustic remarks that could be viewed as just another
extension of the noise coming out of his strained and already
overworked body.

Alan was unsure whether Frank had taken his advice, or rather his
warning, of the other day, or that perhaps finally out in the wider
world some woman had finally agreed to sleep with him and this was a
more relaxed, laid Frank he was seeing, one he was going to have to get
used to.

"Your acting different today" Alan stated at one point during the
morning, hoping to goad Frank into revealing what had changed him so
much.

"Am I?" Frank asked, breaking off from the cheerful whistling he had
been doing all morning.

"Yeah, like totally different"

"Oh well, sunny side of the street and all that" he replied
cryptically before going back to his tuneless whistling and that was
all Frank said on the matter.

For the rest of that morning what was said between the two men
concentrated on the impossible set of tasks Doughnuts Adie had given
them that morning.

It was coming up for lunch and they had just about finished task
number one: putting all the re-boxed items of furniture up on the
racking for storage. There was no more room in the warehouse except for
the highest shelf and it had taken both men the whole of the morning to
get the boxes up there.

It was the third or second final box and while both men rested at the
top Alan noticed something as he got his breath back.

"Hey, this is the box you were beating the crap out of the other day
there. Remember?" he said to Frank.

"Oh yeah, so it is" Frank remarked.

"Be glad to see the back of this then eh?" Alan grinned.

"You bet I will" Frank said, taking his weight off the box and
beginning to arrange his body for the climb down.

Down from below there was a shout. Both men turned to look down. It
was Dougnuts, still wearing his cap, shouting up to them.

"Pearson!"

"Yes" Alan shouted back down at his last name being called.

Doughnuts tilted his hand towards his ear.

"Telephone call!"

"Okay, just coming" said Alan and began to make his way down before
Frank. Once he was at the bottom he turned to look up at the box they
had just put up. It was well away from the edge and wasn't in any
danger of going anywhere soon.

There was a telephone situated right in the middle of the enormous
warehouse. Alan jabbed anxiously at the buttons to take the incoming
call. At this time of day he was unsure what it could be about,
something to do with Clara was his immediate suspicion.

It was.

Five minutes later he was bouncing off the walls with happiness, on
his way back up to see Frank, telling anyone else he saw on the journey
the good news. By the time he made it to Frank he had three of the
members of staff in tow with him as well as Doughnuts, eager to clap
him on the back and share in his good fortune.

Lunch had now been turned into a celebration and Doughnuts was already
planning what bar they should go to that night to have a drink.

"Frank!" shouted Alan first upon rounding the corner to the area they
had been working in. He looked up to where they had been, stupid really
Frank would be down the bottom by now he realised, but before he let
his gaze drop he noticed the absence of the box they had list lifted up
which was now gone.

It was wrapped round the middle with a light blue seal and it was this
colour among anything else he expected to see when he looked.

It didn't take long for him to think there had been an accident, less
than a second really, it made perfect logical sense: three minutes ago
he had just received some amazing, brilliant news that his son had just
been born and now Frank had had an accident. Good news followed by
spectacularly, bad news all in the space of a few minutes.

"Frank" he shouted again beginning to climb the mountain of boxes and
pallets between where they had came in and Frank was probably lying
down a hole with a box crushing his head.

The others began following him, led by Doughnuts beginning to absorb
the change of events going on all around him and then resorting to his
usual reaction in a crisis: barking orders at people who wouldn't even
be listening to him in the first place.

Less than a minute of looking and they all found him much as Alan had
expected, down a hole with a huge and heavy box lying awkwardly on his
stomach.

Fortunately he was still alive, still awake and conscious enough to
look totally embarrassed in front of them.

"Alright down there Frank?" Dougnut's was the first to ask. It
probably wasn't intentional Alan later thought but since Adie had been
saying stuff in the same, slightly sarcastic way of his for so long it
came out sounding jokey, mildly insulting.

A few of the others laughed out of nerves and Frank nodded his head
vaguely in disgust underneath where he was trapped as if the foreman
had just told a really bad joke.

"My back" Frank said wincing in clear pain.

"What about it?" someone said.

"Its broken, I think" he gasped.

None of them knew what to say. After thirty seconds or so Doughnuts
made the smallest of economic gestures with his head to indicate to
Alan that he should say something. He was his friend after all and it
was him who had first came bounding up here.

Alan stepped forward, feeling almost nervous, as if had just stepped
up for an audition and he had forgotten all his lines.

Then he remembered what he was going to say. What he had came back up
to the top of the warehouse to tell him anyway.

"Frank" he said.

"What?" Frank replied irritably, casting his head away so that he
wasn't looking at any of them.

"I've just become a daddy!" he nearly shouted down to him.

Below there was a moment of pause on Frank's face as he tried to
absorb this new information.

"Congratulations" he began to say sourly, his eyes swooning upwards
into his forehead with pain, "I've just became a cripple" he said then
blacked out.

*

It was the day after in the Hospital.

Alan was sitting outside the room where Frank was being kept and
thinking to himself how easy it was you could get used to a
place.

He had been here last night, not where Frank was but in the east wing
of the building where the maternity unit was, and here he was again
this afternoon, sent, or selected, by the people in his work to go see
Frank and offer the many condolences and get well soon messages none of
them felt capable of delivering in person, marvelling at how much a
part of the place he already felt.

The Hospital itself was huge and must have housed at least a thousand
people in it yet Alan felt as if he were already known, that between
the patients and the staff he was a familiar character whose presence
there was about as questionable as the porters who wheeled around the
trolleys of medicine all day.

Contrary to everything he read in the papers these days about
Hospitals everyone was friendly and there was little if any signs of
violence about to erupt.

Alan supposed such goodwill was bound to occur in a place like this, a
place where the division between being alive one minute and dead the
next was constantly narrowing who wouldn't be inclined to look upon a
stranger and include them also in everything that made you feel human,
everything that was to be savoured about being alive.

Of course he quickly realised that could simply be his own perception
of things. Less than four feet away from him was a door behind which
was a person who probably didn't share his point of view.

Frank's world had taken a sudden downward lurch while his was on the
rise to such an extent he could barely keep a coherent line of thought
in his head.

Thoughts of Frank, his accident, what the doctor had said to him about
his back, kept on turning into thoughts about his new son, the
happiness he now felt and how his future, which Alan had always viewed
of as hazily indistinct, now seemed clearer and more ascertained than
ever before. Like bad television reception which he had always been
used to suddenly snapped back into focus, everything, all the details
crystal-clear and vividly sharp.

Even as he sat there, waiting, doing nothing in his chair, events,
things to come, were quickly multiplying further down the line. A
future was already occurring without him and it was this, the
powerlessness he felt before it, he loved more than anything
else.

"Everything else is just gravy". It was a phrase he once thought of
when he first met Clara, that he no longer needed to worry about life
and which direction it would take, only now did he truly feel like
that.

"He's ready for you now" said a doctor coming out of the room. Alan
nodded and rose from his chair.

Inside the room lay Frank propped up in his bed. There was a drip
leading from one of his arms but apart from that he looked just like
any other person one might see in a Hospital bed with not too much
wrong with them. Alan, though he knew nothing about back injuries, had
expected Frank to be wired up inside some hideously clunky piece of
mechanical apparatus, something that would have looked like a cross
between an ancient medieval device of torture and some expensive item
of equipment from the gym.

Hospitals had such machines he knew and it was the absence of such a
thing in the room that indicated to Alan the finality of Frank's
injuries. Obviously he was beyond such measures now.

"Some cards for you" Alan said, holding up the letters all the boys
from work had gave him. Frank said nothing but motioned with his head
to the table on the right-hand side of the bed. Alan crossed the room
and put them there, noticing that there weren't any other cards, and
sat down on the seat next to the bed.

Was it Hospital policy he briefly wondered to make all the chairs out
of the same hard plastic, the sheer uncomfortable nature of these seats
all in aid of keeping visitors not staying too long.

Alan looked up at Frank hoping that it would make it easier, in fact
it made it worse. Their first exchanges were hopelessly inept and as
the small talk continued to dry up Alan felt as if he were talking to a
complete stranger, less than a stranger even for a stranger had
something to disclose, here everything was already known and in Frank's
sullen refusal to speak with anything less than one syllable it was as
if he were trying to suck back into him everything the world knew of
him.

Alan pretended to know what was happening inside of him and infuriated
with his silence burst out into a passionate rant, surprising even
himself as he began preaching at length about how he had to snap out of
it, that worse things had happened to other people and even though he
might not be able to walk again it wasn't the end of his active
life.

It was a ridiculous tirade, composed of things he had heard from soap
operas and hospital drama's and the sheer incompatibility of these
clich?'s with what he was seeing before him made him want to gobble
these words back up even as he was speaking them. Frank just smiled as
if he had heard it all before.

"Tell me about your son" he asked once Alan had blew himself
out.

"Kevin?" Alan replied a little breathlessly, "Fine, healthy I mean.
Clara was in labour for six hours and the baby came out normal. I was
just up visiting him actually, he was sleeping so I just watched him
for a while from behind the glass. Then I came and seen you"

"You should have carried on watching your son, there's nothing to see
down here" he told him.

"Don't say that"

"Why, because its true?"

"I came because I wanted to see you and because after yesterday we
were all worried about you"

"So where's everyone else?"

"Come on, you don't expect them to shut down the warehouse for a day
just because&;#8230;" Alan let his words trail off.

"Because I broke my back. No your right, business must go on."

"Its not like that, everyone's real cut up back there about what
happened, honestly"

"Don't lie. I'm a misfit in there, I have been from the very first day
I started. No-one likes me and now that I'm gone I don't think they'll
find any difficulty in replacing me"

"Doughnuts said you would get your job back if you got better" Alan
said which was the truth. Frank however just laughed at the idea.

"Doughnuts, Doughnuts" he began spluttering, "He isn't even the one
who does the hiring. He's just a jumped-up gimp in a boiler suit with a
superiority complex. No, as far as the companies concerned I'm
history."

"Well get another job or live off invalidity, you'll get by" Alan told
him. Frank just shook off the notion as if he were talking about events
taking place on another planet.

Right now there was only this room and the personality he somehow had
to rebuild in time within these walls before they threw him out,
everything else- including Alan -was irrelevant.

Alan stayed for another twenty minutes and following Frank's outburst,
the conversation flowed along on more natural, easier subjects. Losing
his temper like that seemed to have done him some good and he sat back
calmly in his bed as Alan told him about the night out he had just had
with the rest of the men in the work, telling him who was so drunk they
were sick and detailing for him the various failed attempts at
seduction some of the men had tried on with women once they got to a
club.

After that Frank said he hadn't had much of a time last night and that
once the doctors had finished with him he had spent most of the early
hours of the morning watching one of the communal telly's they had in
the Hospital. One of his favourite shows was on last night, a gritty
American cop show and as he described it for him Alan couldn't help but
interject and say that it was one of his favourite things on television
as well.

Frank seemed stunned that he could also like the show and as he
back-tracked through various episodes, talking about the characters and
some of the cases they had been on, Alan couldn't help but thinking
that at last the two of them had something in common.

For the last month of working with him he had come to think of Frank
as a vague, somehow insubstantial person. Only now, with his accident
and hearing him talk enthusiastically about his favourite character- a
huge black detective who liked to beat confessions out of people and
once squeezed a paedophiles genitals together so hard he got blood all
over his hand -could he begin to think of Frank as someone real,
someone who might exist beyond the hours that they worked
together.

It was a slight thing but Alan it noticed more and more as the
conversation went on. Every so often, perhaps every thirty seconds,
either while he was speaking or Frank was, Frank would suddenly break
off eye contact and look at something over Alan's shoulder. It was an
involuntary movement, almost as if he wasn't aware he was doing it at
the time, but whenever he did this his face would briefly fill up with
fear and Alan would have to stop himself from turning round to see what
he was looking at.

He didn't however as he wanted to encourage Frank to keep on talking.
Frank talking excitedly about his favourite programme and generally
acting towards Alan as if he had found a kindred soul was so different
to the sullen uncommunicative person he had first walked into lying on
the bed that he didn't want to leave him as he had found him.

Deep down he suspected it was all an act, that he was putting on a
performance simply to make Alan think he wasn't as bad as he first
seemed.

The minute he closed the door and left the room Frank would
immediately lapse back into a total depression. The smile he offered as
Alan left would thaw and all the words they had just conjured up in the
room together would be obliterated in a howling gale of manic,
panic-fuelled anxiety.

Alan would walk off into his world and Frank would be left in his. It
was such a horrible image that the more he thought about it Alan
thought it would be best to leave as soon as possible. To delay any
longer would be a torture and the most humane thing now would be to
leave Frank to get on with it.

Finally he couldn't bear it any longer and said he had to go earlier
than he originally wanted to, citing Clara as an excuse.

Standing up from his chair he noticed what it was Frank had been
looking at all along. It was a wheelchair, quite a basic one by the
look of it, and from the way it had been stuffed tightly in the corner
it was clear it had been put there just for storage rather than for
Frank's use. At least for the moment.

Suddenly he could understand the look of terror on the man's
face.

"Need to think up a name for me now like Doughnuts eh?" Frank said
from behind him, seeming to know exactly what Alan was thinking at that
moment.

"Yeah" Alan said softly looking at the wheelchair and trying to
imagine Frank in one for the rest of his life. Frank depending on an
object for the rest of his days.

"How about "wheels". "Wheels Frankie", sounds great dinnit?" he
laughed, his voice beginning to come apart.

Alan couldn't think of anything else to say other than agree with him.
"Wheels" it would have to be.